Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

by Jane Borden

It’s one of America’s foremost creeds, that one can start with nothing and end with everything, thanks only to hard work.

Victim blaming is a hallmark of almost every abusive relationship because it leads to silence. It’s especially pernicious in financial scams because those who see wealth as proof of salvation also claim poverty indicates sin.

In the previous year, only about ten people out of the more than two thousand he had recruited had netted more than one dollar.

Amway and even its illicit tools cult aren’t that different from modern American capitalism itself.

A code of conduct was explained to Massachusetts Bay Colonists before they even arrived, in the famous city-upon-a-hill speech by newly appointed governor John Winthrop: “Thou must observe whether thy brother hath present or probable or possible means of repaying thee, if there be none of those, thou must give him according to his necessity… though there be danger of losing it.”24

As previously mentioned, the Puritans saw hard work as a foundational way to glorify God. Since wealth is a natural outcome of hard work, striving for wealth itself became not only OK but expected. Plus if God rewarded his chosen with eternal life, wouldn’t he also reward them in earthly endeavors? The richer you got, the more evidence he loved you back. These religious beliefs created an economic engine that propelled New England to dominate Atlantic trade. But, as Cotton Mather put it in the 1690s, “religion begot prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother.”26 In this way, in addition to being a mistake, American capitalism was also inevitable. Those driven by greed instead of piety began perverting these Puritan ideals to justify their own acquisitiveness, and that engine the Puritans had created became too powerful to control.

In 1905, economist and sociologist Max Weber noticed that “for any country in which several religions coexist… people who own capital… tend to be, with striking frequency, overwhelmingly Protestant.”

The MO for maintaining superiority was the use of what historian Irvin G. Wyllie, in his 1954 book, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches, calls the “success rationale.”28 Wealthy businessmen claimed their success was evidence of being chosen by God, while poor people had either failed or lost God’s favor.

Unfortunately, by the time all of these acolytes began indoctrinating youth into the movement, the window was closing. Even after that truth became undeniable, by the early twentieth century, acolytes still preached the gospel. It was convenient for them to do so. If the masses remained focused on the dream, they’d be too busy hustling to fight for social services, government regulations, or collective power, any of which would have alleviated the poverty ravaging America, but specifically at the expense of the self-made men.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, “success,” to most Americans, “had long since come to mean achievement in business, and in making money.” But they didn’t understand that much of the wealth they witnessed had simply been redistributed. Instead, there was a general assumption in America that riches were infinite,

In 1859, Abraham Lincoln said, “If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer,” it was surely “because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.”32

as the Industrial Revolution wore on, it became harder and harder for poor boys even to catch a break. One study determined that among businessmen who reached elite status in 1870, 43 percent had come from the lower classes.37 But by the first decade of the twentieth century, only 5 percent of leading corporate executives had risen from poverty.38 The number would continue to shrink.

Few of the success-cult handbooks of that time provided practical business advice, for example, on accounting, advertising, production, or investment. More important was for you to be industrious, frugal, honest, sober, etc. Also, far from being a hindrance, your poverty was your ticket because it forced you to overcome adversity—overcome sin itself—which is how you developed the aforementioned moral character deemed so essential. Such arguments are tautological. God rewards good moral character. Ergo, if you are rich, you are good. Therefore, money is good simply because you have it.

“You need not be ashamed to be rich,” Henry Ward Beecher told his Brooklyn Heights congregation, and “you need not be ashamed to be thought to be seeking riches.” Beecher saw America playing a special providential role in the pursuit of civilization by accumulation: “Nowhere else does wealth so directly point towards virtue in morality… as in America,” he preached. “We have been put in the van among nations.”

However, they did reason that when God gave money, he expected it to be used in a godly manner—for libraries, schools, museums, hospitals, and orphanages—and not exclusively for the millionaire’s own benefit.

Carnegie and others saw an important distinction between philanthropy and charity, though. It’s one thing to build a hospital. But giving directly to the poor would only “teach the hard-working, industrious man that there is an easier path.” None of the $125 million he gave away between 1887 and 1907 went to direct relief because, Carnegie believed, “every drunken vagabond or lazy idler supported by alms bestowed by wealthy people is a source of moral infection to a neighborhood.”50 Church leaders mostly agreed. Beecher said, “Looking comprehensively… no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault—unless it be his sin.”51 Wyllie’s research turned up a handful of extreme views, including from one leader who wanted to abolish almshouses altogether and instead send missionaries to tell the needy that God had decreed only those who work get to eat. Another advocated systematic starvation of the impoverished since they had deliberately chosen poverty and therefore should be allowed to suffer its natural consequences.

wealth couldn’t result from serendipity because good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. This was the new moral law. Luck wasn’t really a thing anymore—the Reformation and the Enlightenment had killed it.

The refusal to acknowledge luck as a force in the world is central to cultlike thinking.

Among traditional folktales are countless stories containing similarly random Lucky Twists of fate. People who behave badly are rewarded just as often if not more so than those who behave well. That was the whole point: sometimes bad things happen. Not because you deserve them but simply because life is hard.

the reason for the Lucky Twist’s endurance. It wires our brains for optimism. The existence of true luck tells us that good things can happen, not that they will or won’t based on certain criteria but simply that they might at any moment for no reason at all. “That creates durable optimism,” Fletcher explains. “If something bad happens to you, you just say, ‘Well, bad things can happen but that doesn’t mean a good thing couldn’t happen tomorrow.’ That keeps alive your optimism.”

For millennia, stories have helped humans develop empathy, resilience, imagination, and an understanding of life as messy and complicated, all of which lead to better problem-solving. “These deeper emotional processes have been nuked by modern fairy tales,” Fletcher explains. “As a result, kids are coming out with more anxiety and anger. They think of everything in terms of right or wrong. If something’s wrong, it’s either their fault or somebody else’s.” Shame or blame. Victim or righteous. Damned or saved.

When we blame others, we tend toward conspiracist thinking. When we blame ourselves, we are more easily victimized.

even as the public became aware that much of the barons’ wealth had resulted from government initiatives. For example, in the 1860s and early ’70s, $100 million in U.S. bonds and loans and 100 million acres of U.S. land were given to the railroads. Ida M. Tarbell’s meticulous investigation into the Standard Oil Company revealed “that rebates, rather than righteousness, provided the foundation for the Rockefeller fortune.”

Nevertheless, we are all deeply indoctrinated into this belief system of financial success or failure as evidence of morality or sin. Our inherited Puritan beliefs—of work as holy and idleness as evil—have been perverted by those wishing to plunder, to justify having already done so, and to ensure their ability to continue on. These beliefs have metastasized to the degree that today, what’s often being plundered are people themselves. It’s classic extraction economics.

It also holds that God has commanded his chosen to charitably improve the natural world by using its resources to sweeten the lives of the chosen. Empty a mountain of ore, abandon its scarred carcass, and move to the next mountain.

Over the last four centuries, many have come to believe sinful “nature” also includes certain groups of people and have accordingly exploited them as resources, the most glaring examples being the transatlantic slave trade and the massacre or resettlement of Native Americans. Then, as this bit of ideology ransacked its way through American history, it met and merged with the work-is-holy-and-idleness-is-sin doctrine. They are natural collaborators because the belief that poverty results from sin diminishes the humanity of the impoverished in the same way the grace-nature divide diminishes nature. Together, these two bits of Puritan doomsday ideology have collaborated to uncover a new and abundant natural resource: the lower classes. Together, they have justified the ability of the supposedly chosen and deserving wealthy to plunder the allegedly undeserving lower classes. This has been incredibly good for business because, unlike ore in a mountain, the American poor are a renewable resource.

For example, company profits: since 1980, average worker paychecks have only increased by 12 percent, while CEO pay has risen by 940 percent. When adjusted for inflation, earnings of the bottom 90 percent have barely risen at all. In the 1960s, typical American workers earned about 20 times less than their CEOs did; now they earn 300 times less.

Between 1975 and 2020, fifty trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.

Future workers, meanwhile, are hobbled not only by their parents’ ever-shrinking bank accounts, but also by “deteriorating schools, unaffordable college tuition, decaying infrastructure, soaring healthcare costs, and diminishing basic research” because the wealthiest Americans have plundered our nation’s collective coffers in a race to top each other on the list of largest penises, sorry, I mean biggest douchebags, oops, I mean the Forbes World’s Billionaires List.68 For the last decade, seven or eight out of the top ten on this list have consistently been Americans.69 The fact that the wealthy aren’t competing to fall off this list demonstrates how irreducibly our culture associates acquisitiveness with moral character.

Our collective indoctrination into the belief that work is holy and idleness a sin not only robs the poor but entraps them. Once you fall below the poverty line, there’s no escape because, at that point, we’ve unconsciously decided you’re choosing to be poor by not working, that you have the ability to pull yourself out if you actually want to.

A 2016 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that, among those subject to work requirements, employment increases “were modest and faded over time” and that stable employment “proved the exception, not the norm.” It determined that the most successful programs were those boosting “the education and skills of those subject to work requirements, rather than simply requiring them to search for work or find a job,” and that “such requirements do little to reduce poverty, and in some cases, push families deeper into it.”

The propagation of the ideology claiming work is holy and idleness a sin continues because it is convenient to those who profit off of it—who profit by seeing the chronically poor as a resource they can extract. For example, the $11 billion charged in overdraft fees in 2021 by the biggest banks. Those most likely to overdraw their accounts are, of course, those with the least amount of money in the accounts. (The alternative is for funds not to be available.) The 9 percent of customers who carried average balances of less than $350 were responsible for 84 percent of that $11 billion gross profit. Sometimes people were charged overdraft fees on the same account multiple times a day. “The poor were made to pay for their poverty,” writes Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University and author of Poverty, by America.

Ninety-nine percent of all participants in any kind of MLM lose money, a statistic so well documented, I don’t even know what to cite. In spite of these staggering losses, people keep signing up. According to MLM representatives, 18 million American households are under contract with one of these companies each year, and spend $20 to $30 billion in fees and purchases.76 That’s one in six Americans, the same number who get food poisoning annually (kind of a similar feeling), the same number who report depression (coincidence?). Each year, more than half of those 18 million are new recruits—replacing the same number who tired of losing money and dropped out.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took note and investigated, winning one case and settling another two. Then the FTC went after Amway, the white whale, filing prosecution in 1975. By then, however, DeVos and Van Andel had friends in high places. Soon-to-become president Gerald Ford, who was raised ten minutes away from where DeVos and Van Andel grew up, was already a friend and fund recipient of Amway. In 1979, the verdict came in: Amway was guilty of deceptive recruitment tactics, but innocent of the government’s biggest allegation, that the organization was an “endless chain” (aka pyramid scheme).

in 1984, a light bulb: the Washington Post reported, “In 1975, when Amway came under a Federal Trade Commission investigation as an alleged pyramid scheme… Van Andel and DeVos had a 43-minute Oval Office visit with [then president Gerald R.] Ford. A month later, Van Andel was quoted in a Michigan newspaper as saying that Ford was aware of Amway’s troubles with the FTC.84

Since 1979, pyramid schemes have proliferated in America at an astonishing rate, all of them claiming they’re legitimate businesses because they’re just like Amway, and the government said Amway isn’t a pyramid scheme, so they aren’t either.

In 1979 DeVos and Van Andel—then listed as two of the four richest people in America—reached the title of “eagle” for how much they donated to the Republican National Committee.

Scheibeler is one of the few who’ve ascertained the scheme. Most are too distracted to see it. That’s intentional. Gilded Age robber barons told poor people they could gain wealth partly to distract them from revolting against their exploitation. MLMs tell participants they can be rich to distract them from the experience of being robbed. Politicians suggest welfare recipients don’t want to work partly to distract the public from demanding social reform. Political power players racialize poverty to distract poor whites from banding together with poor people of color. Giant corporations offer wellness services partly to distract employees from the real sources of burnout. Starbucks sells $5 bracelets to support investment in impoverished communities, which distracts from the fact that it keeps almost $2 billion offshore to avoid paying taxes that would support investment in impoverished communities.97 Meanwhile, those being distracted are also taught to internalize blame for their own exploitation so that when the distraction wears off, they’ll point the finger at themselves.

cheating on taxes, skipping fare on public transport, applying for government benefits for which you don’t qualify, accepting bribes, and shoplifting.98 There’s a pattern in those examples: taking.

FitzPatrick argues that MLMs are the quintessential manifestation of late-stage capitalism: “Slavery, colonialism, and then cannibalism. We finally just eat each other,” he opines.

Conspiracy theorists are right that an elite group puppeteers the U.S. government—they’re called plutocrats. The only reason this isn’t a conspiracy theory is because it doesn’t happen in secret. There are other differences, for example, plutocrats don’t want to “exterminate” the rest of us (probably because they can’t extract resources from corpses).

In a 1962 New Yorker essay, James Baldwin discussed the Nation of Islam, another alleged Black-supremacist, Muslim-ish doomsday group (from which York may have borrowed heavily). Baldwin explains, “One did not need to prove to a Harlem audience that all white men were devils. They were merely glad to have, at last, divine corroboration of their experience, to hear… that their captivity was ending, for God was black.”

Us-versus-them thinking is so central to cult success that if you don’t see it being manipulated, you’re probably not looking at a cult (but a Utopian community or group of fanatics). Sometimes the enemy is overt, as it was for the Nuwaubians. The Puritans’ “them” was Catholicism. Mankind United used the Hidden Rulers. And countless groups warn of a cabal… or lizard people, liberals, Jews. Enemies also always include those who question the leader or try to extract followers. The specter of “them” motivates us to piety and keeps us in need of protection. A con artist’s manipulation of us-versus-them thinking is especially effective on those legitimately wronged. But the tactic works on all of us because the human tendency to see the world as comprised of in groups and out groups—the most basic and foundational characteristic of all cultlike thinking—long predates the Protestant Reformation.

Us has been killing them for as long as us has existed. It’s a defining aspect of our species.

It helped us so much that we evolved to place a lot of value on norms. When someone doesn’t follow one, we tattle. It remains part of our brain chemistry to police social norms in one another; even three-year-old children have been documented doing it. Neurologists have discovered that when people punish norm violators, their rewards circuits fire—the same areas that light up in the brain when we are given money or food.

Cults are A+ students in the creation and enforcement of social norms.

The notion of penance was explained as a shortcut—a hack—to self-improvement. From an evolutionary perspective, that’s actually pretty accurate: punishments for transgressing norms are as central to group success as the norms themselves. But if a social-norm violation is extreme enough—for example, speaking out against the group—rehabilitation is not available. The punishment in such cases is ostracism.

Evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich describes the ladder of punishments for social-norm violations when he writes, “If violators are not brought into line, matters may escalate to ostracism or physical violence… and occasionally culminate in coordinated group executions.”19 Being able to cooperate during times of attack—or when launching our own attack—was so important, we killed members of our own group who mitigated that effectiveness.